A recap and few updates of my previous posts..

I’ve been sharing a few of my experiences here at Purdue for quite a while and its definitely worth it, if, I could add more value to it by giving more information to the readers of this blog. So here are a few things I found on the net. First, the movie “the social network” is releasing on, I believe, Nov 2 in India and here is how you can win free tickets for the premier show. Attending marketing classes this module, I kind of understand why there is such a competition (event) and if I were to be Mark Zukerberg (CEO of facebook, assuming he is involved), I would give away free tickets to almost everyone who writes. So, you have 3 days, write in 20 words, how social network has changed your life and chances that you might win a free ticket is more.
Second, you might recollect the story of Kiva. Here is the speech she delivered on TED. The speech was delivered in July. So, the speech was very much similar except that she wasn’t so emotional when she was at Purdue. Pay attention to the Profounder concept, I did forget to mention about that. Now, for those who haven’t seen TED should indeed check the website ted.com. I often listen to these speeches and every speech has only motivated and inspired me.
If you had observed I mentioned competition and in braces, I mentioned event because my Economics Prof. makes us think of Competition as “Conflict over scarce resources”. Well, if there is a conflict in this case (too many entries than the no. of seats available in the hall), then I can’t guarantee of the free ticket. However, the opportunity cost (cost one has to forego to do an activity) is small when it comes to writing 20 words. So, give it a try!

Module Break: Time to think about everything else

This blog isn’t anything about any (MBA) experiences rather its more about the first part of the title of this blog. We have finished our first module and are having a short break for two days and a weekend and what better time than this to ponder on some other thoughts. This break had been quite useful as to make a visit to Indianapolis to get a correction done in my I-20 at the Borders and Customs office, to talk to the Director of IT resources about Assistantship opportunities, to apply for a Indiana Drivers license, to hang out with a few friends, to do some laundry, to watch some movies, to do some shopping and to follow some of my favorite writers on net. BTW did you observe that Nirmal Shekar has been writing articles very often, almost twice a month. I thoroughly enjoyed reading his articles.

Last Saturday, we invited a few American friends at Sino’s place for a Indian dinner. Sino made a Kerala style beef curry and I prepared my signature chicken curry and we had a good time that night. It was interesting to see how the guests fell in love with the pressure cooker and got excited every time the steam came out of it. That night while discussing cultures and history, Rob’s roommate asked me about the religion I follow. I casually said “My family follows Hinduism”. Then he asked me specifically about the religion that I follow. That put me to think for a while and I said “I kind of follow all religions but by birth I’m a Hindu”. To me all religions are great and calling myself an atheist wouldn’t be quite true. I kind of believe in practices of many religions and participate in all their festivals. I enjoy the wine and plum cake at Christmas to observing a short fast (only to eat haleem in the evening, sometimes two), during Ramzan. And participate in Ganesh Chaturti processions and play around with fireworks for Diwali. Oh Boy! I’m missing India now! 

Then he asked me whether it represents our generation that we are not particular about following any religious faiths. Honestly, I was drunk that night and don’t really remember what I told him. But that question remained in my mind and I thought a little more about that after reading this Tasneem Nashrulla’s post. While I know many of my friends who are pantheists or atheists that makes me think “yes, this generation is not very particular about any such faiths”, on the other hand, the frequent chaos in the name of religion makes me think otherwise. While following a faith and not following any are quite debatable, it can be argued that by not being particular about any faiths, we can avoid many potential communal clashes. On the other hand, the young generation could be aimless without following any faith and it would be easy for the perpetrators of false believes to attract these youngsters. My point is, more than religion what makes me worried are the infamous faiths starting from Jihad to anti-westernizing processions of Bhajrang dal.

Moving away from that topic, I, as always, differed with P. Sainath’s recent articles, but somehow I keep reading them as it always gives me a different point of view. But I was enraged by this article, specifically when he wrote about the movie Slumdog millionaire. I understood why the elite personalities protested against it only after coming to the US. Honestly, when someone tells me today that he/she loved the movie slumdog millionaire, I kind of feel very embarrassed. It represented an India which we do not want to be, which we have long forgotten and which is not how we should be looked at.

I wish, I had more such breaks. The break ended with shopping on the touchdown discount. Touchdown discount are Mondays after a home game when Purdue wins there would be a discount on apparels by no. of touchdowns times 5 percent. There were 4 touchdowns and a 20% discount this time. It seems like more than the actual game of football, what matters is everything else. Anyways, Boiler Up!

The social network and the parting gift

There are actually two things in my mind that I wanted to include in this blog, but since I didn’t have enough time to write 2 different blogs, I thought of clubbing them both together. One, I saw the movie “The Social Network” on Monday night and two, today is the last day of classes in this first module.

Monday evening, I had a some free tickets with me for a movie that night called “the social network”. I got those free tickets for volunteering in a net impact club activity. So, I decided to take a break from my daily chores and enjoy the movie with a few friends. The movie was about facebook, on how the idea came up and was developed. Another thing the movie concentrated is on the people involved in the development of the idea and ironically, they ended up suing each other. I loved the way the idea was developed and it resembled quite very much of how “Hobbies n You” was developed. Although HNU is no facebook, it was inspiring to see a few similarities in the development aspects of facebook and in HNU especially when they were working on creating a USP. And I recommend you all to watch this movie, even if you were not part of HNU. Focus on the exclusivity part they tried to bring in the development of facebook. To me, what I enjoyed during the entire HNU episode was the ways we tried about making an idea come to life, all on our own. It might not have been a genius but it certainly was indigenous. And it often makes me think, when there is so much satisfaction in just what we have done, how wonderful it could have been, if we were to take it further.

Second, today is the last day of our classes of our first module. That means I wouldn’t have any more of quant, Accounting and Organizational Behavior class and I will have to take exams next week. On top of these, there is a lot of pressure to get a internship. I was enjoying the bliss of being back to school and suddenly all of these come pounding. Its like you were enjoying a nice little early morning dream and suddenly someone wakes you up.

There are numerous philosophies developed on a train and I’ve heard people sharing a train example for explaining some of the philosophies they believe. One of the most resounding example was from Satish Jayaraman from Cognizant. He said that his life is like a train, like many passengers who get in and get out, but the train goes on… etc. The train examples have been so much of a cliché that many-a-times when something ends and something else is going to begin, I feel like I’m travelling in a train. Yesterday, on our final OB class, after the lecture, I went to my professor, shook his hands and told him that it was a pleasure to be in his class. He said that he appreciate that and handed out a piece of paper calling it as a “parting gift”. I took a glance at the paper and the first line that I read was… “We are travelling in a train.” I was like “oh no, not again!”. Here is the parting gift he had for us. I like it, hope you will too!

Stretching the boundaries in classroom

Now that I’m attending classes in a college for a while, I thought of writing down about how much I’m enjoying my classes here. It might be because a) It’s exciting to be back to school and b) The professors are really cool here. When I think of some of my favorite teachers, there are a few prominent faces that cross my mind. I can’t rank them in any order but each of them were different in their ways. However, what differentiates them from rest of the teachers I have faced is their approaches in teaching. Whether it be a mock election process or an “extempore skit about influencing people” in a classroom, the innovative approaches that these teachers bring in fascinates me the most. In this post I’m particularly writing about one such approaches, I appreciate in some of my favorite teachers.
There used to be a lecturer in Gowtham, who used to teach us physics. A typical class of his would begin with news updates, which was necessary in those days as we almost stayed isolated from rest of the world. Then for 15-20 minutes, he used to take a class which used to be more of diagrams on the board. There were many days that I can think of when he drew a diagram on the board and just walked out of the class without even saying a word. A closer look at the diagram for a while often revealed some of the concepts in physics. It was beautiful to discover a concept hidden somewhere while trying to decode the diagram. It was kind of a piece of art like the one in “Da Vinci Code”. There are many such instances when he used to leave us with an unfinished example, prompting us to think. Oh boy! that was stretching the limits of one’s thinking capability at least in physics.
What I appreciate in the Professors here is the innovativeness they bring in their teaching. Almost every other professor has his/ her own different approaches which will vary depending on the subject it is (with reference to Quantitative and Qualitative!). Okay, I’m talking about the Qualitative subject: Organizational Behavior (This class is so interesting that I can’t stop writing about it!). For every class we have to be prepared with a case analysis and often it is seen that the discussion in the class next day would be quite different yet related to the same topic. For instance there was this case about how conflicts arise in a team and team politics and blah blah blah! So, we were mostly prepared on those and the class begins with our Professor asking “Tell me about instances where there are teams with no/ least conflicts”. A good amount of time was spent on discussing why are conflicts rare in such teams? What are the disadvantages of having “no conflicts” in a team? Oh boy! I tell ya, its much easier to answer why conflicts arise than to answer why they don’t. And disadvantages of having no conflicts in a team! My first thoughts were “are you kidding?”. The idea is that by directing our thoughts in exact opposite direction, our professor brought the point of how to resolve conflicts and foster healthy team spirit. Today, in class we were shown slides with 8 different definitions of leadership (developed in various times) and the Prof asked us to critique each of the definitions. How better is it than someone just standing on the dais and defining “Leadership” and explaining the qualities of a good leader.
Later our professor throws out a statement: “Hitler was an effective leader but not a great leader” and asks us to comment on that. People brought in various ideas and the class discussion later narrowed to why Hitler turned out to be “not a great leader”. To summarize, Hitler’s motives were such because “Desperate times calls for desperate actions”. Felix (a German in our class), brought in the perspective of the people of Germany then. Hitler was admired in Germany when he was rising to power because Unemployment and bad debts were primary concerns of the people and Hitler gave a hope to the people through his inspirational speeches. Later he started exploiting his people and then people started fearing him. They had to succumb to his pressure!
I don’t think that someone can be a great leader unless he gets his motives right from an ethical and a moral stand point. To know more about Hitler as a leader, our professor recommended a movie called “Downfall”. I have it with me and this is gonna be my weekend watch! And hope yours too!

Net Impact and Creating Opportunities

Last Friday I joined the Net Impact club at our school. Having joined in two other clubs at Krannert, I was a little reluctant because of the time constraints I have here. There are some really cool clubs here, one of them called student managed Investment fund, where, as students we get funds from the university (an undisclosed 6 digit figure) to invest in the market. Having played around with real money, it was very tempting for me to bounce upon the opportunity. But I kind of saved it for later, in fact, I was choosing between Net Impact and SMIF as the third club, after Consulting and Operations club. The reason I chose to be in this club is because the club’s motive is so consistent with my idea of social service.
At this point, for those who think of MBA grads as greedy young chaps trying to improve their pay scale, should try to change their perception. Social service is in the heart of almost everyone I’ve met here. In fact, my team mate Josh is pursuing MBA because he can go back to the Non Profit sector and improve some organizations he consulted before joining the school.
Next, I never considered Charity/ donation as doing social service. To me giving some money, or some other materialistic things like cloths, books didn’t really make sense. I believe that Social service is done by creating opportunities to elevate people living under the clutches of poverty or any other sort of disabilities. Its like an old saying that goes something like “Feed a man with a fish, he might not starve for a day; teach him how to fish, he would never starve”.
Today, we had Jessica Jackley tell her story of Kiva.org. in the wonderful speech she delivered on “The power of harnessing Perspective” She has been recently shortlisted for the Forbes 100 most influential people on earth along Sonia Gandhi, Mukesh Ambani etc. Please do check in the website to know more about the organization she founded. As a kid, she was afraid of learning about poor people. (In fact to me as well, whenever i hear stories of poverty, I used to kind of refrain myself. It used to scare me as a kid, thinking what if I were in those shoes.) Then one day, she happen to listen to Dr. Muhammad Yunus, 3 years before he was given the nobel prize, and her perspective changed since then. She started believing that she could help people come out of the vicious circle of poverty. She thought of micro financing as a solution to help few of those living in poverty. The idea of Kiva is that, you can loan any amount (even 25$) to an individual who wants to scale up his business or start a new business. It could be a small loan to buy a sewing machine. The beauty of Kiva is next. You will know to whom the money has gone to, what is he doing with that money, and constant updates through e-mails about his progress. There is a connection established between the borrower and the lender. The borrower also returns this 25$ or so by the specified time. Then you invest this 25$ into someone else’s idea and so on. How cool it would be to track the changes that you are bringing to lives of the people. The happiness in that is your incentive, ain’t it a better incentive than tax breaks or any other form of ROI? Amazingly, the default rate at Kiva is quite comparable with Industry standards, may be because of the connection established! She had recently rejected a $10 million donation from a corporate because it would kill the very idea of Kiva.
The reason I wrote this post at 2am amidst a busy schedule is that those who think creating opportunities as “quite impossible because I never get any time in doing all these, rather I’ll just give away some money”, to change their perspective. A change in perspective could come up with something as wonderful as Kiva, then its time to rethink about our perspectives, at least in this regard!

Quantum increase in Knowledge

Flashback: In mid may 2006, ironically, on a not-so-hot summer evening, Nikhil, Hari and I were passing by our college canteen after our project evaluations were done. Life was almost on the edge of being messed up, after our evaluator slammed our project calling it theoretical, and new hopes/ excitement of getting into the corporate world. We crashed onto Mr. Anjeneya Murthy, who taught us Analog, Digital and what not! communications subjects, for a small chat. He asked us this question in the middle of the discussion “Why do you need internals?” Now, we were in no mood to answer that question. And so, we kept our mouths shut… BAU! After a brief silence, Mr Murthy volunteered to answer the question himself. “When ever there is an internal, you guys will study at least for a day. You see, there is a small but quantum increase in knowledge”. To an extend that was true. We used to study a day ahead of exams, what we used to call one day batting (I wonder what they call it here… a home run may be… whatever!). And such internals always brought in that bit of knowledge which we could sometimes recollect for the finals.

Back to today, We are done with our first exam in accounting. I’m not discussing that because I messed it up. Anyway, I get another chance to cover this marks in my finals. The way it works for this subject is that we can chose whether to consider this marks or not, in our finals. The reason for the little flashback I brought in was that I found the relevance of the phrase “Quantum increase in knowledge” here as I was preparing the “cheat sheet” for today’s exam. Yes, you read it right, we were allowed to take one “8x11” paper, printed front and back, in any font, with whatever we want on it. Oh boy! I tell ya, people found innovative ways of preparing that cheat sheet. As I was trying to compress the 240 pages syllabus into that one sheet, I realized that the process did help me understand many concepts. In fact for many, that preparation of cheat sheets was itself a bigger task than actually taking the exam; it was like another exam. In a different perspective, the cheat sheet concept is like an assignment with a question “Summarize chapter 1-6 in one page”. And because we are doing it for ourselves (to be used in exam), there is lot of intrinsic motivation to do the best! Irony is that the cheat sheet was of no help for me in the exam. I didn’t have any time to look into it at all.

I was wondering what if we had such system in place in engineering! How wonderfully we could have micro xeroxed everyone else’s’ cheat sheet into one and then again micro xerox it. Oh boy! the Xerox shops in Kachiguda might have made hellava money.

For those who follow the links that I post sometimes, there is an article on the net (Its copyrighted so i don’t think I can link here) called “On the folly of rewarding A while Hopping for B”. Here is your Quantum increase in knowledge.

Seasons, Déjà Vu and more…

It happens sometimes when you are updating a blog after really long gap that you come up with a title as weird and vague like this. I’ve been busy keeping up my schedule on reading, case analysis, home works, mid term and what not? But I did miss the writing as much as you missed reading (For those who follow this blog).

The first part of my title is probably because I saw a malayalam movie by name Ritu (means Seasons), where the movie ended with a question “Seasons change, do we?”. What I understood from the movie is ‘Yes, we should change like seasons’, but its highly unlikely that we return to where we were. May be because of too much of Organizational behaviour class, I started analyzing characteristic analysis of the characters in the movie. Oh I’m not getting into details though. The movie kind of moved me though. Do comment in this post if any of you have a different opinion on the  movie.

Another reason is that the season here has changed from Summer to Fall. And I tell ya, Weather is awesome! Temperature fluctuate between 11 and 25, no humidity and cool breeze most of the time. Today, as I write, we are almost at the ending of Labor Day weekend, which is when officially fall begins. I’m Hoping to see the colors of fall soon and hoping that we get a delayed winter.

The second part of my heading is because of the quant classes that I’m attending. It was in 2nd year 2nd sem, when we had Prof. Rajan lecturing on Probability and Random variables. The entire semester’s syllabus + some linear programming is our Quantitative analysis subject. The application of those theorems and concepts is different. I’ve faint memories of that class, so every day, every topic that I see on the slides is like… Déjà Vu, though I don’t feel very nostalgic about them! Good thing in Quant is that I don’t have to learn any derivation. It’s a joke here in MBA that Engineers are always behind deriving formulas than actually applying them. Sometimes our professor after explaining a theorem says “If Engineers are interested in proving this theorem, they are welcome, but only after the class”!

Coming to some specific events that happened in the last 10 days in the reverse chronological order, we had labor day off today, so this weekend was kind of relaxed. So I did my laundry along with Sino and Rolince (fellow batchmates). Kinsley and Sibin (phd students here) visited my place on Friday. John, a US Coast guard commander now, who sits beside me in my OB class, threw a party on thursday for a promotion from Lieutenant to Commander. I did go to have a few beers. On the same day we had Real Admiral Tom Ostebo, in charge of the logistics and Engineering of the Coast Guard deliver a lecture on leadership and ethics. All the military folks in our Class were dressed up in their uniforms and it was good to know that more than 15 people in our batch is from military of different countries.

Last weekend Rakesh and Laxman, visited my place. They had come to see the Moto GP race in Indianapolis. Though I couldn’t join them for the race, I definitely enjoyed their company on that weekend. It was so much like old days. This time, I did feel Nostalgic! One of the things that I’m happy about after coming to the US is that, I never felt away from home so much. The first week here, I was busy speaking to many of my friends that I almost felt like home here. Many a times I felt like I had just moved from Kochi to Hyderabad again!

Last Friday of august, we were taken to a camp nearby, where we did a bunch of team building activities. It was kind of fun to do those activities and we did take a few lesson while returning home. Below are some pictures taken on that day. I’ll introduce some of the folks I work with here…

We were trying to balance a seesaw kind of a thing. Team mates Josh (in Blue) and Chun chun seen in picture. The one behind me is Kijee.

While trying to cross a fictitious acid river with just 3 planks of wood and 25 people.

Together, trying to place one tennis ball in its place holder.

Josh, me and Steve caught napping in the middle of the event!

That’s team Tune up: Standing beside me is Jeremy, our team mentor and others sitting  from left are Kwanshik, Kijee, Somak, Steve, Tao; second row: Chun Chun, Amber, Pierson (Team mate), next two names I’m unable to recollect!, third row from left: Josh, Mike, Teresa, Deena and Amilcar.

P.S. I’m sorry, if any of you read this post and find your name spelt incorrectly. I’m too bad in spelling.

Later that week in our OB class, our Professor explained about why such camps are necessary and why do Organizations spend a lot of money on such activities. He taught about Hawthorne effect which was very interesting. To me the Hawthorne moment was when many asked me over the weekend about the inactiveness of my blog. I’m glad that I could post again, and I will keep posting.